The Telegraph’s review of Philip Roth’s Ghost Exit

One last round for literature

Zuckerman Unbound (1981) was about the moment in the spring of 1969 when Nathan Zuckerman realised he was famous.

He was sitting on a bus going down Fifth Avenue when two girls turned to look at him. « Veronica, » said the smaller one, « It’s Carnovsky. »

Soon the whole bus was straining for a view, but as Zuckerman dryly noted, « they had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to a character who lived in a book ».

The confusion of Zuckerman with Carnovsky re-enacts what has happened to Philip Roth since his notorious third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Nathan Zuckerman has become such an enduring literary impersonation that everybody confuses Roth with the character who first appeared in a short story by another alter-ego in My Life as a Man (1974) and came to tragi-comic life in nine novels.

Roth’s reputation now largely rests on three of those novels, a trilogy in which Zuckerman dreamed up the lives of flawed heroes at key moments of post-war American history.

American Pastoral (1997) was set against the Vietnam era, I Married a Communist (1998) explored the McCarthy witch hunts and The Human Stain (2000), the « culture wars » of the 1990s. Surely now the Great American Novelist (and his impersonator) will tackle September 11, 2001 – the new « biggest thing »?

Exit Ghost begins with Zuckerman, after 11 years as a rural recluse, with no distraction from his « task » other than post-prostatectomy thoughts of incontinence, impotence and death, returning to New York, the most « worldly-in-the-world » of cities.

It’s a place that offers chance sightings of long-lost loves and small ads for house (and perhaps life) swaps. It’s a place where sex and politics happen. The latter is easier to avoid than the former.

Zuckerman briefly contemplates going to Ground Zero, but he doesn’t even make it to the subway. Such a pious journey would have been « wholly out of character for the character » he is. Zuckerman describes himself as a kind of Rip Van Winkle and, like Rip, he’s not that interested in the great changes that have happened in his absence. He just wants his old self back.

So Zuckerman offers to swap a 71-year-old writing life in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts for the West 71st Street apartment of a couple of young writers. Instantly he’s in love with the wife, or a fantasy version of her.

Perhaps « there is no situation that infatuation is unable to feed on », but Jamie Logan seems a particularly banal love object. Swathed in cashmere, she agonises over Kerry’s loss to Bush and whether she’ll ever publish again in The New Yorker.

Zuckerman imagines a series of desultory dramatic scenes in which he tells her she’s charming and corrects her ungainly English, but his « fictional amplification » does not much improve on reality. It’s a come-down for a man who could once conjure up an engagement to Anne Frank.

It is not only his penis that seems to be leaking. What « counterforce » can a writer employ against the « imp of amnesia »? What happens when fiction no longer provides « fortification »?

It is tempting to read Exit Ghost as an example of what Edward Said called late style. Lateness, he said, was not about tidying up but « intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction ».

But whether imagining counterlives (to adopt the title of Roth’s 1986 novel) or counterpunches (as he did in The Human Stain), Zuckerman has thrived on what he likes to call antagonism and often dramatises as boxing.

There have been many fights over the years, life versus work and life versus death being the biggest. Zuckerman’s trip to New York is clearly his last round.

But there is one more battle to engage in: the « second death » of biography versus the limited immortality of literature. This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts.

More critical than any piece of plot is Zuckerman’s re-reading of the authors he « discovered as a student ».

The first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (1979), was a portrait of the artist as a young Jew, a young American and a young man. All those things he came to understand by arguing with Lonoff.

Now, 48 years later, 40 years dead, Lonoff’s ghost teaches his elderly « son » how to confront his posthumous fate. Things don’t look promising, for the same reasons as always. From Portnoy on, as Roth noted in 1974 and again here, readers have mistaken a novel disguised as a confession for a confession disguised as a novel.

In Exit Ghost Lonoff’s reputation is threatened by a would-be biographer called Richard Kliman who, after looking at some photographs and an unpublished novel, has decided that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister.

Zuckerman thinks this is nonsense – Lonoff, he argues, stole the plot from the biography of another Berkshires recluse, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The matter is never resolved but the « excitement of taking someone on » (especially a virile, younger version of himself) revives Zuckerman more than his daydreams of Jamie Logan.

The Facts (1988), a book Roth slyly subtitled « a novelist’s autobiography », ended with a letter from Zuckerman telling Roth that he had become little more than a « walking text ».

« Without my work, » Zuckerman reflects here, « what would be left of me? »

Karim Emile Bitar graduated from France’s National School of Administration (ENA 1997-1999) and from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). He also studied Law at the University of Paris Sorbonne and obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and International Relations from McGill University. He spent his senior year at Harvard where he studied Government and specialized in Middle East Studies.

He is president of KB Consulting Group (management, communication and public affairs consultancy) and editor of French monthly magazine L’ENA hors les murs. He teaches international relations, political philosophy and management at various institutions and business schools.

He joined the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) as an associate fellow in March 2008.

Between 2000 and 2004, he worked at France’s television channel CANAL + (Vivendi Universal) as a project leader in charge of strategic planning, business development and external relations.

He edited and co-wrote the collective book Regards sur la France (Seuil, 2007, 640 pages), in which thirty personalities from across the world (former heads of state, intellectuals, political scientists, economists, artists and heads of multinational firms) analyzed France’s strengths and weaknesses.

Karim Bitar was born on September 25, 1972, in Beirut, Lebanon, the son of former minister Dr Emile Bitar. He holds Lebanese, French and Canadian citizenship and is fluent in French, Arabic and English.